Achieving Efficiency through Robotic Process Automation

James BenhamOn this episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast, we're talking about achieving efficiency through robotic process automation with Dan Savage from MassMutual. The geek podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We'll be interviewing guests and doing deep dives into specific tech we see changing the industry. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out. This episode of the InsurTech Geek Podcast is brought to you by JBKnowledge. JBKnowledge specializes in outsourced software development solutions for property and casualty insurance companies.

Check out our services at jbknowledge.com. And we are back with another great episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast. With me, I've got my main man, my fellow Texaganderer, my golf player extraordinaire, my most interesting man in insurance. That's right. He's with us, Rob Galbraith. How's it going, Rob? It's going, James. It's going. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

Rob GalbraithStarting to pick up the game again after, a couple decades away from it. My college age son, he's finally belatedly got hooked on golf. So I've been going out with him and, yeah, I still can hit it past him, you know, three or four yards. Makes him feel the guy. There's a little beat down on your son. Little beat down. Yeah. I mean, he the scoring isn't close, but who cares about the scoring? Like, that that's that's more important about the the drive. So Exactly. Yeah.

You just gotta show us buy him. Yeah. Yeah. He's a lot taller. He's a lot more muscular. I wish I had his jeans. I don't know where they came from.

James BenhamYeah. Well, that's great, man. I mean, look, out driving your college age son is every dad's dream. You know? You gotta put him in his place. Exactly. Remind

Rob Galbraithhim that the old man still still got it. You know? Gonna be eligible for the senior tour here. They're the champions here. They go now in a month or so. But yeah. So I'm not ready for that yet. I'll tell you what, I might I just picked up my daughter from Boston from Boston.

James BenhamShe was at Boston Conservatory for three weeks at their, she's 17, going to a high school senior, at Interlochen Arts Academy, but she went to Boston Conservatory for this summer camp for musical theater dance and watching her perform. It's just so incredible. Like she's so far exceeds any place I ever got to with singing or dancing. And, cause I I'm, you know, into piano, guitar, singing, I'm in a, you know, ballroom dance team and she blows, she blows anything away that I've ever done musically. So it's, it's, it's exciting.

I mean, it's really exciting to to to watch your kids, succeed, but it's also exciting to put them in their place sometime and show, hey. Look. Oh, you know, I still got some skill. I still got some skill. Well, that's great. Well, I'm glad glad to hear it went well and obviously good to see you. And with us today, our our special guest, Dan Savage from MassMutual, joining us from beautiful Connecticut. Dan, how's it going? Great, James. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Man, glad to have you on.

It's always great to hang out with fellow Insurtech geeks who are putting technology into action every day in real insurance companies. You know, no theoretical stuff here. We're talking about real deal, real deal technology implementation, which is what I like hearing about. And before we get in talking about what you're doing at MassMutual, about robotic process automation, about all those fun things that you can really radically transform organizations, one little automated process at a time, we're gonna talk about you. You've got a a a really neat, local story.

Right? You are about as local as it gets there in ConnectICut. That's course how I learned growing up in Louisiana. They had to keep it simple for me. And so that's how they told me how to spell your state. So, you were born and raised in Connecticut near the near Massachusetts. Then you went to college in Connecticut, and then you went to work at MassMutual in Connecticut. Right? And so you're you're you're you're still in that same radius when you you see your high school friends, your college friends, and your work friends in the same night.

I

Dan Savagewouldn't say that now that I've got two kids, but but yeah, I've been in this area for my whole life. Like you said, I grew up closer to the mass border. I work up in Springfield now. MassMutual has had offices in Connecticut as well. I worked in some of those. But yeah, I've been here my whole life and if you're gonna get into insurance, this is a decent place to get into it, right? Hartford's the insurance capital of the world, at least that's what they say around here, right?

James BenhamMaybe America.

Dan SavageWill hold back And in the MassMutual is right up the road about twenty five, thirty minutes from there.

James BenhamWow, that's great. And what led you I mean, you know, you didn't, like when you kind of look back when you were a kid growing up in Connecticut, like, do you wanna be when you were a kid career wise? Like, I I wanted to be I wanted to be an astronaut. Like, what what what what would you what did you aspire to be?

Dan SavageI mean, you know, I guess it depends on what age. Right? So like when you're a little little little kid, don't remember what I wanted to be. As I was growing up, I got super into soccer. That was a big thing. You know, my dad played college soccer for UConn. That was always something that I wanted to do. But as you get older, you realize the chances on some of those things are very slim. Maybe I wasn't good enough. Right? And then as I kind of got a little bit older, I started getting more and more into writing.

I found I was very good at that. So that's kinda like when I went into college, where a lot of my focus was and I love sports. So in in in college, I really I focused in on journalism and mass media and that sort of thing. That's where my communications degree lied. And then getting out of college, you know, I had a lot of friends who had who had started to look in the space of, like, journalism, TV, broadcasting, all of those sorts of things. And I started looking at the hours for that, the opportunity for that, newspaper being sort of like a a dying, a dying, a forum for for information.

Right? And I had connections and and they helped me get in the door at least, to a place like MassMutual. And that's really where I've been ever since.

James BenhamWow. And that's so rare to see, you know, a real connection there in the beginning that that, you know, you found a calling. Again, you didn't go to school for insurance, right? And most folks in the insurance business don't. Now there are more and more and more college programs for insurance, which I'm really excited about. And certainly I'm I'm on the board of a public university in Houston called Texas Southern. I'm trying to get an insurance program kicked off there. You know, we all wanna show people the light early, but most of us stumble into this.

I did. And and you did. What was it about the industry and MassMutual specifically that that kept you hooked for a decade and a half?

Dan SavageYou know, MassMutual has been around for a long, long time. The building that I go into every day is, I don't know how old, a 100 years old more. What kept me around, I guess, would be there's just so much and so much opportunity in different types of roles that you can take on, That you can, you know, without sort of jumping to different places, right? Different organizations, you can do pretty much whatever you want there, right? So it's like, if you want to move into technology, if you want to move into marketing, if you want to move into sales, all those sort of opportunities are all there for you, right, being a large company.

And I love the people. The people there are awesome. I have people that I've known for sixteen years and still see. A lot will come and go. Sometimes they leave and then they come back. But those types of connections definitely keep you around where you have that familiarity and it's company that's frankly grown quite a bit over the over the last ten years or so. You know, there's there's achievements that they've, made in the in the last, you know, decade, that frankly when we when I got there, I didn't I didn't think they could get to some of those sites.

So it's definitely been a company that even though it's a legacy brand, it's really been on on the rise quite a bit over the last ten, fifteen years. It has. I've been a policyholder, MassMutual, for a very long time. Thank you. Yeah. So I

James Benhamvery consistent company. I like stability in my insurance I do want innovation. I was talking about this. I was a speaker at the Insurance Council of Texas yesterday, and as innovative as I like to be, innovative as I like my company, our products to be, As a customer of insurance, I value stability more than anything else. I want I want stability in my premium payments. I want stability in my dividend checks. I want, you know, I want I want you to be there when I have an issue.

And, you know, it's it's it's something I think that we've gotta always balance when we're when we're talking about InsurTech is that it just needs to deliver technology needs to deliver stability as well as as well as, you know, an improved user experience and customer experience and better improved financials. Well, it's cool. So, I mean, you you you did a whole bunch of different, you know, jobs in this. And I think, you know, the obviously, the the one that we're talking about today, you're a strategic business consultant internally.

You're really an internal business consultant to the other sections of the company. Yep. Rather than, you know, them hiring a consultant externally, they have you going around and consulting with different organizations. Yep. And so you've really risen through the ranks. So tell me what you do now and then we're going to jump into RPA.

Dan SavageSure. Yeah, so just to kind of make the connection, right? So I talked about in in school where I really focused was, yeah, my I had a journalism, minor when I was in school, and that's where I where I started. Right? Through the years and when I started at MassMutual, I did a lot of writing, a lot of technical writing, training, that sort of stuff. But it really gave me a perspective of the whole company because we worked with all different areas within it. I did that for a number of years, managed along the way as well.

About almost five years ago now, I made the switch to get in the business as opposed to supporting the business. I moved to our claims organization with a primary focus as a consultant for robotic process automation, RPA. But once I got there, of course, once you're in the business, once you're tight to that, there's all sorts of other opportunities that present themselves in addition to what they brought you there for. My job right now is a lot of one ideation around what are the things that can get us better, managing projects that are within the claims space, working with other areas outside of claims like marketing and other areas that support the products that we serve.

Really runs the gamut, but a lot of the focus tends to be around how do we make that connection between our technology group and our frontline. Right? So, you know, I've sort of had this reputation of being able to speak business to business people and speak technology to technology people and be able to bridge those two worlds. So that's really, I think, you know, if I had to sum up like kind of what I do, think that that captures it.

James BenhamYeah, it really is a unique skill to be able to communicate across that divide, The technical chasm and be able to understand what's going on in technology enough to to relay the message correctly and understand business well enough to understand the problem. For sure. And obviously the ideal state is that the technologists that are developing solution sets understand the problem in the business, but that's actually quite difficult because if they're, if they're going to be effective technologists, they it's hard to hard to have them spend enough time understanding the business.

And so you you've, you know, at some point people have to specialize and then you need a bridge gapper. Right. And that's, that's, that's really just such a critical role. It's also really good that you went to serving claims. Yeah. That's, well, that's really neat. And, why don't you, since this can be our topic to draw, then I'll hand it off to Rob. Just define what robotic process automation is and what kind of projects you're working on briefly. And then I'll let Rob jump into it.

Sure.

Dan SavageSo I would say especially being at an organization that's been around as long as MassMutual, and this is probably the case with a ton of insurers across the world, right? We have policies that have been on the books for fifty, sixty years sometimes. With that comes a lot of old systems and set processes that have been around forever. So from an RPA perspective, really what we're doing is we're taking a lot of those existing processes that truly have remained stable over a number of years and using technology, allowing these bots or automations to run through the steps that a person would normally do.

I would say one thing from that perspective where we had kind of started with it versus where we've gone with it, We really started from this perspective of what can we automate. Looking at something and say, is that something that can be automated? Is this thing that this person does something that we can hand over to a bot? We learned that was difficult and the reason why was because the way people do things and the way somebody might need to program one of these bots may be slightly different.

People can use their eyes to do things which bots are now starting to be able to do a little bit of. People may be using things off the side of their desk or referencing things that a bot wouldn't necessarily have the capability to do. That's where we transitioned from that what can we automate to more of a how can we automate. Taking a look at a process that maybe a person has done for the last ten years, the same exact way, looking at it and figuring out what are the little pieces of that process that present a challenge for us from an automation perspective?

And can we then tweak those things to make it work? Or are they even things that need to happen? Sometimes in organizations like this, especially if you have folks who have been doing the same job for a long time, you find things all the time that people have no idea why they're doing them. They've done them a certain way for a long time and you ask them why do you do that and they go, I don't know, somebody told me to do that a long time ago.

Sometimes along the way we even throw away steps that just add no value to the process. But that's really been the journey for us and it was really a bumpy start for us, I would say. We didn't really start off on the right foot with robotics. It took us a number of years to catch our footing with it and really understand what it meant for us to do the process automation stuff. But we've gotten to a point now where we've automated a lot of the major tasks that we do and we have a really good pipeline for how to continue to do that.

James BenhamThat's great. Rob?

Rob GalbraithYeah. Dan, I'd love to have you expand a little bit on some of the best practices that you've identified. You know, I've led teams in the past where, you know, if you see robotic process automation in action, it can be this miraculous thing. I think of, like, a macro and steroids from back in the day. But I've also seen challenges where exactly to your point, you know, you sit with somebody, you say, well, they do this task. It takes them fifteen minutes, and they do it 2,000 times a year or whatever it is.

Right? But things can change even in relatively stable processes. You know, I remember one in the past where we were, like, logging in to a department of insurance site or some type of thing to get some compliance information. All of a sudden, the government the state government changed their website. Right? And now all a sudden, none of the RPAs work, everything's crashing, whatever. Yeah. So, anyway, I'm just kind of curious, maybe you can share, like, some of those hardworn learnings like that as you've established, like, okay.

Now here's some things that we found out that established this best practice.

Dan SavageOne of the big things I think for that early on they were doing a lot of using the UI, the user interface to actually do the robotics. They'd look at the way some going back to the what can we automate? They would look at what the person was doing and say, Okay, let's have a bot run through those steps. Walk through the screens the exact same way that person would walk through them, all of that. The problem with that is anytime anything changes, now we got to fix something, we got to update.

What we learned to do through the years is more and more try to use APIs and sort of go through the back end of these systems. So as opposed to hitting sort of the front end, which could change slightly. And in some cases, if it was like an external website, we wouldn't even know about it. Right? You know, those things that can change at a moment's notice, take some of that out of it. Right? Sometimes those APIs still have to change over time, but less likely.

Right? There's there's more of a base there that doesn't generally change as much. That's one thing that we really have tried to do is whenever possible, we're not using the UI. The way somebody might do it, we're going to hit all the same notes, but we're doing it a different way.

James BenhamYeah. It's really important to sometimes lift ourselves out of this specific solution and say, okay, let's stop talking about this one piece of technology. Like, we're not a UiPath shop. Right? Right. Right. Like, UiPath is one tool. We might use Blue Prism, might use UiPath, we might use something completely different or something completely new or, you know, that might not be the solution at all. Maybe the real problem. And this is an often misattributed quote. It's often misattributed to Einstein. He didn't actually say it, but, whoever said it said if you, if you have an hour to study a hour to solve a problem, spend fifty five minutes studying the problem and five minutes studying the solution.

Yeah. And and and we often square peg round hole solutions on top of problems saying, hey, you have a problem. Let's let's let's slam we we already have a UiPath practice and team. Let's slam UiPath on top of it, automate that task instead of saying, hey. Is there an API for that provider? Yeah. Can we can we do an API crosswalk with ours and then, you know, have something that's fully automated? I mean, that would that that would be really great. And, of course, the nice thing about API is is they're intended to be accessed by machines.

So they tend to be in change control processes and, version control. And you have, you know, do you, you'll, yes, you can have some things deprecated out of an API feed, but, it's very it's managed. Whereas, you know, RPA can sometimes be mass chaos, right? You know, like, like UPI, sorry, UiPath has a, the ability to adapt to a screen that has minor changes. Yeah. But at some point you're gonna have to rewrite the bot, right? For sure. Yeah. I mean,

Dan Savagewe write about the first time, we know that that book is not closed. We know that at some point we're going to have to do updates. We know that at some point we're going to want to enhance it. When we try to look at those opportunities, we try to get as much as possible that can be done in an automated fashion that's not problematic. But we also see as the person who is the go to for our claims organization for this type of work, I get a lot of things thrown at me where somebody will say, hey, why don't we have a bot do this?

Sometimes they're too small, sometimes they're not the right type of use case for robotics. And what I try to do is really focus on the problem as opposed to could this be a bot? That's part of my job as a strategic consultant is trying to help folks think through some of those things, Whether it's different reporting that we can provide to somebody, whether it is just maybe a simple process change or some way to stream data that we hadn't thought of before. All of those things come into play.

Like I said, I'm known for the robotic space, but when that problem comes across my desk, it's really about, okay, what are we really trying to solve here? Are you just trying to get something annoying to go away? That's something I find a lot. A lot of times what I see is somebody will come to me and they'll say, Hey, it would be great if we had a bot for this. Then I start to ask more questions and figure out how often does this happen? Oh, it happens once a week.

It's like, that's probably not going to work. It's not something that we would build for. But what can we do? What are the options we have at our disposal? That's the way I always try to approach it. It's like I write everything down that comes to me and nothing is thrown in the trash. But there's a right place for robotics and there's a wrong place for it. And we've got to build in the right ways.

James BenhamAnd when we mean, you know, robotics, of course, we're talking about software robots, not hardware Yes, absolutely. Just for the folks out there that tend to think that robots are only hardware, they're not. These are software robots that, you know, the best equivalent for those of you who might be having a difficult time with this is macros in Excel, you can record something except UiPath and Blue Prism and other tools like that can adapt to the screen. So they actually have the ability to learn and adapt.

Whereas if you change one cell on your Excel, on your VB macro, it's going to break the whole thing in Excel. And so just keep that in mind too. I also like that you're calling out probably the most important question anybody in any innovation or technology organization that any insurance company should ask. And you called it out. You said, what's the real problem here? Yeah. Right? If you I always I always feel like people should just print that out and put it on the door because people will tell you what solution they want, but that solution's constrained by the box that they live in.

Yeah. And so if you if you really dive into, you know, we had we had a recent issue with claims as well, where we were looking at EOBs being attached to the payments and then we were being told by the adjuster that what they needed was this very specific thing. I need the EOB in here. I need to be able to print out both and then attach them later. We're like, what if we just put it all together and bundled it up front for you? So you need to do that.

Like, if what if we pre bundled it and we made it seamless and we automated the entire process rather than giving you the output that you're asking for, which is the output your twenty year old system had? Yeah. Let's rethink EOBs being attached to payments and how many times they're imagining like

Dan Savagethe simplest solution that would that would get it solved for them. Right? And not thinking about maybe like what the real issue Yeah.

James BenhamYeah. Exactly. Rob?

Rob GalbraithActually, that's exactly what was gonna follow-up, Dan. So obviously, you know, you don't have a claims background. I'm sure many of the people that you do work with do. They've, you know, lived claims day in, day out. And one of the struggles that I see is that people that work in particular systems, they have a hard time thinking about process independent systems. Right? The system is the process. And so I'm imagining you come in and you have that even though, you know, you're inside MassMutual, you know, you're kinda coming in with claims knowledge, but not claims expertise.

And so that gives you you probably know enough just to be dangerous. Right? But you kind of are bringing a little bit of that outsider's perspective. So we'd just love for you to maybe share a little bit about, particularly in claims, like, are there certain processes, whether it's first notice of loss, subrogation, you know, getting medical records? Like, is there any use cases that you've seen kind of work really well? And then conversely, maybe there's a few that really robotic process automation may not be the right solution for based on what you've seen.

Yeah, I would say

Dan Savagesome of the things that I The way I would have answered this question probably three years ago is probably different from the way I would answer it today. What I mean by that is technology grows so much, so a lot of the use cases that we would have thrown out three, four years ago are now on the table again. From sort of a claims perspective, some of the things that we've seen that have been really successful in automating, Sending out letters is a big one or follow-up emails, those sorts of things.

Automated text messaging is something that we've done a lot recently. You actually mentioned medical records. We actually have some automation in our DI claims space where we do ordering of medical records. That one's actually a perfect example. We talked about APIs. That bot that we had was originally built off of the user interface, and every single quarter we'd have to double check to see if it worked still. About a year and a half ago or so, it got rewritten where now it was going in through the the API that was created for it.

So those are just like those are examples of where, you know, even in three, four years time where stuff changes, you know. Another good example of where a business case where we would have thrown it out, the ability to do text recognition or character recognition, the ability to read forms. When I started doing robotics, the idea that you could take a form that came in, have a bot read it, determine what's on it, and then do something with it was basically Wizardry. Wizardry, right. And now we have a few bots that do that work.

There's some manual intervention when somebody's got sloppy handwriting or something. In those cases where somebody actually hand wrote and filled out a form when it comes back in. For the most part, can program it so that it knows what fields it's looking for, it knows how to grab that information and then actually do something with it. That's where I say a lot of the business cases we didn't even think were on the table are now on the table. I think we got to a point probably two years ago where some of the bigger blocks of work that we thought were the RPA cases that we were going to get.

We got to those in a lot of ways, we did those. Then as technologies move forward and we've had more opportunity to use some of it, we've seen just new business cases be able to spring up. So it's something that, you know, at some point, you know, I always say with a lot of these automations that we do, ultimately we'd like to get rid of them. Because some of this stuff is built off of old systems that we hope go away. Or I talk about reading information off of forms.

It'd be great if I didn't even get a form sent to me. In a lot of ways, it's patching up legacy software and administrative systems that we have, and we hope that someday some of this stuff goes away. But as you guys probably know, some of that stuff is not fast moving in the insurance space. Getting rid of old systems that may have 50 old policies on it is not exactly something that goes quickly. Those things we know will be around for a while. So it's a matter of, you know, continuing to to to up the ante and move, you know, move to the next spot where we think we can be useful with this stuff.

James BenhamIt's a moving target though. I mean, the RPA capabilities are really dramatically expanding just that the and especially with once you integrate RPA, because robotic process automation, the ability for a software robot to read a screen and read anything on the screen and then take action based on that, that's been around long before large language models really were mass mass popularized. Well well, now I can summarize the content of the screen, tell you about it, and then then actually draft a response for you. I mean, the the the capabilities are dramatically expanded now with and so that that does give you a few more weapons in the toolset.

Ultimately though, I kind of feel like a lot of these technologies are transitional technologies, right? That are meant to get us ideally a fully integrated future. If you have a fully integrated system,

Dan Savageyou know, then then you don't need there's a lot there's a lot of things you don't need. Right? Yeah. The more people, the more people sort of like interact with us digitally, the more we have to sort of do a lot of this stuff, the more we can build straight through processing and do that sort of automation as opposed to the robotic process automation. Yeah, exactly.

James BenhamVery cool. Rob, you want to bring us home?

Rob GalbraithYeah, Dan, just, you know, talking about and curious your thoughts, you know, in the past, know use cases are articulated to me that were challenging a few years ago was you might identify the word surgery, for instance, right, as part of handwritten notes from a doctor. But what you didn't have is a contextualization to say no surgery is required, or surgery may be required if physical therapy is, you know, not successful, or surgeries were required immediately. And and that may require different actions by a claims adjuster that might be routed to different adjusters, right, based on their expertise and and things like that.

And so those were some of the more demanding, I guess, use cases four or five years ago. And it sounds like a lot of that now through, you know, combining with AI, large language models are are possible today. So I'm just kind of curious, like, where do you see the future going, with some of these technologies going forward?

Dan SavageSo, yes, I mean, so that stuff, when I originally came to claims, one of the big things they were looking at was sort of natural language processing. How do you take, you know, text that's on a page, whether it be handwritten or typed, right? Make sense out of it and then be able to use AI to make decisions off of it. Four years ago, there was not a lot of well established solutions for this stuff that was readily available. It was starting and we were knocking on that door, but we never really felt like there was anything out there at the time at least right, that could hit all the all the aspects we wanted to hit.

Right? To your point, you know, if you're using those sorts of, processing models to to to pull up any sort of useful information using AI, you've got to be able to siphon out the stuff that's in the way. One thing we noticed with certain things was if we had a natural language and process are looking at, say, medical records, And we'd look for a date of a surgery. And a lot of the models would pick up the date that the form was sent over. So a lot of that I think has continued to evolve.

We're actually moving back into that space after taking a break from it and trying to use AI models to better understand, especially on the DI side where we're managing these blocks of claims as opposed to with life and annuity death claims, which we do, which are more of sort of like in the door, out the door. But for disability claims, it's how do we manage this block and understand where are the opportunities to follow-up with folks to potentially close claims. Right? And we're gonna we're we're gonna start over the next year looking in looking at that more, and we have some solutions at our disposal now, that we think can be a great help for that because that world is extremely complicated.

Trying to deal with folks who are on disability, the different something like back pain, right? Back pain, could be There's the range of limitations somebody could have from something like that is huge. Being able to use AI or natural language processing models to be able to cut through some of that and give us sort of a sense of like where to go with something like that, we think is going to become a big part of how we operate.

James BenhamVery cool. Well, this is a excellent conversation. I actually would like a lot of our listeners to listen to this because there's so many practical takeaways. I want to point out that in this discussion, we are discussing the use of AI as one tool set, but not as the tool. In fact, we actually don't need for, you know, we have two eighty employees. We work for insurance companies, right? We build software. What We build software for insurance companies, right? We can solve most of our clients' problems without using AI.

Like just in general, most of the issues, if you look at the average backlog for the average insurance company of things they need and problems they have, most of them can be solved without ever leveraging AI at all. So AI is not the end all be all, it's not the multi tool solve everything. It is an amazing tool. It's incredible and I really enjoy it. But, you know, what you're hearing is that, there's a whole lot of meat and potato solutions that can be solved very directly.

And, that's exciting. It's exciting. I'm excited for you, especially with what you can do for, for MassMutual. So I wanna I wanna wrap up with this this final question. Like, I'm I'm a sci fi and Star Trek fan. Are you Star Trek or Star Wars? I would be Star Wars for sure. I've I've I've seen some Star Trek, but not much. Okay. I can live with that. Here, I just need you I just need you to remember that Star Wars is historical fiction because it was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, so it's past tense and Star Trek is the future.

In the future. Yeah. So no one's fantasy, one's sci fi. That's okay. It's cool. I actually was not into Star Wars until, of all things, Mandalorian. Broke me a Mando. Mando. It's a great show. It's a really good show. And I was like, man, this is really good.

Dan SavageYeah. So I that's when I actually kinda got into I want to compare you to my kids, but that's when my kids got into that too, because they saw that little baby Yoda. Right? Dude,

James Benhamhow can you not see? I have a stuffed baby Yoda at the house. Like, how can you not see baby Yoda and want not just love? You're like, oh, I do the baby Yoda. The funny thing is whenever we would watch that show,

Dan Savageyou know, there's all these gaps where baby Yoda is not really pictured. Right? And they'd be like, can you please fast forward? Because we

James Benhamjust wanna watch Baby Yoda. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. This show is Baby Yoda. Let's be let's be honest. So thinking in the vein of Star Trek and looking to the future, like what's what what what big leap do you feel like is coming up or that you've seen that that has yet to be leveraged?

Dan SavageYeah. I mean, the AI thing has become so prevalent, right? So like you said, not the tool for us to solve all problems, but we're seeing that it's going to be increasingly one of the major tools that we leverage. But I think for a company like MassMutual where we have such a long history, a lot of our goals center around just how do we deal with people more digitally, right? How do we get people online that may have had a policy for so long that they forgot about it, right?

Those sorts of things are huge for us. We've really tried to focus a lot on building out that digital experience from new business all the way to claim. And not just for our customers, but for our advisors. The days of doing business on paper, we still get a lot of paper. But how do we move the needle and start to move away from that? Because really what it enables us to do at the end of the day is get ourselves some data actually as opposed to stuff that's just written down.

I think that's one of the huge pushes and that really for us, I think will sort of be the start of how do we then leverage things like AI to then educate our business and what we need to do. Because I talked to some folks, I've been with our claims department for five years. Some of the folks that are in our department have been around there for twenty plus. And they'll tell me about the days where when somebody filed the claim, they had to send a request to get the literal paper that somebody submitted the policy on, right, mail like interoffice mail to them.

Right?

James BenhamInteroffice mail. Yeah. Good old days. And then go to,

Dan Savageyou know, put that in a binder and start to collect all paperwork for that. We'd require sort of like wet signatures, all that stuff. There's people that I know of in our claims department who actually worked with typewriters at one point, right? So it's like, we're coming from a world where that is still in some people's minds of that time. But the way things evolved, everything gets, the leaps become so much quicker. When you look at something like a ChatGPT and how quickly that got to a space where you had a million people using it, right?

One It's 100,000,000. It was it was super fast to 100,000,000. Yeah. And so it's like the changes, the rate of change has continued to just increase and increase and increase. And I think as a company, MassMutual has always been in sort of like a very good standing. We kind of started this by talking about stability, right? And they've been around for a very long time. But I think at the same time, we've tried to do a good job in staying up with technology because there's insurance companies that haven't or have been unstable and have gone away.

So it's not an unheard of thing even for a company that's been around as long as MassMutual. We're always looking towards the future and what those next things are. I know for a fact that there's already things in the works for us in terms of working with new AI models and how do we expand our digital base and all that for our customers.

James BenhamExactly. Awesome. Well, thank you for your time today and thanks for talking with us about all these cool ways you're implementing tech inside most mutual and appreciate it. Thanks so much. And, Rob, as always, thank you for joining in. Yeah. Great episode. Thanks for the conversation, Dan. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in today to geek out our interview with Dan Savage from MassMutual. See you next time. Enjoy the ride and geek out. The InsurTech Geek podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world.

I've been your host, James Benham. That's James Benham dot com with cohost Rob Galbraith at endofinsurance.com. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out.